Karen Klein, the grandmother/bus monitor whose bullying by a group of middle school students was captured on video and posted online, has become a bit of a celebrity over the summer of 2012. I have nothing but respect for this eminently decent woman. But the story of her ordeal has followed an all-too-common trajectory in the American media. Shock has been followed by anger, followed by abstract gestures, followed by self-congratulation.

Clearly, there is a brighter side to the disgusting display of cruelty and intimidation by a pack of malevolent punks taunting an elderly woman, trapped in a school bus with them. The perpetrators were caught, and are now known to their neighbors for having mocked, physically threatened, and inflicted considerable emotional pain on a woman who had done them no wrong, simply because they thought it would be entertaining to do so. Mrs. Klein handled herself with dignity in an impossible situation. And it looks as though the financial support occasioned by the YouTube video and efforts of good Samaritans in an online giving campaign will bring her some amount of pleasure and even financial security for her future.

But I’ve heard more than enough about the bright side of this story. In particular, the notion that “something good” came out of this incident leaves me incredulous. Why incredulous? Because the heart of the “silver lining” seems to be an attempt on the part of the press in particular to reassure Americans that we remain “basically decent”—good, caring people who will do the right thing if only called upon to do so.

Isn’t it pretty to think so. Some people did some nice things. But the virtue required to toss a few coins into an online kitty because you’ve seen a disturbing video is rather minimal. The display is, in fact, all too indicative of the superficial mass culture we have come to inhabit. It reminds me of nothing so much as the “sponsors” in the recent movie, The Hunger Games. In that movie young people, forced into a large-scale, extended fight to the death, strive to present themselves in an appealing manner in pre-game interviews and on camera once within the arena; their goal is to entice people rooting for them to send in needed supplies at crucial points in the game. Like a television pledge drive, the manipulation of mass audiences, whether for good cause or ill, is not something about which we should be congratulating ourselves. I will be pleasantly surprised if we don’t see fake or exaggerated videos crop up in an attempt to capitalize on this latest take on the phenomenon of mass, abstract concern.

To anyone who tossed money into the kitty for Mrs. Klein, I say “good for you.” But the real test of virtue concerns what one does in one’s own neighborhood or city, faced with real, immediate problems, not how one responds to publicity. Those who sent letters, and those in Mrs. Klein’s neighborhood who reached out to her acted in a genuinely decent manner. But, frankly, online campaigns rooted in online videos are, well, just a bit creepy. They bespeak our increasingly pathetic attempts to build a “national community” of concern for people we don’t know on account of things that look particularly good, bad, or disturbing when captured on video. Sometimes these outpourings are critical to addressing massive disasters, but they remain abstract, mass-level emotional phenomena open more to manipulation and shallow self-congratulation than the forging of bonds of humanity. And, if I’m in trouble, I’d rather have a decent set of neighbors than a “caring” bunch of strangers any day of the week.

Even creepier than the internet-as-community fallacy is the suggestion being made that the taunting video should lead us to put cameras in all our school buses so that incidents like this won’t happen again. That there remain people who are willing to give up yet more of their human dignity to the watchful eye of the state is sad. That such a policy, but for cost considerations, probably would have been implemented already, seems sadly clear. The assumption that we won’t have to fear bullying if we just have big brother watching over us in those buses is a sign of just how far we have sunk into dependency on the government to act as our parents.

Other possibilities for systemic responses seem hardly more promising. It looks as though these youths will not get the punishment they deserve (a summer spent in juvenile hall after conviction for assault), and even if they did, my fear is that the long-term result still would be yet more power in the hands of the educrats who already have brought us so many bad ideas and policies. Yet more programs run by un- and mis-educated, ideologically driven bureaucrats convinced that cruelty arises from failure to buy into liberal orthodoxies on race, class, sex, and sexual orientation will do what they have always done: make matters worse.

Of course, we have little choice but to take one or more of these comfortable, co-dependent routes to (non)reform. To really examine the problem, here, might make us look into the deeper mistakes underlying our entire public school system.

It is often said that bullying has been around for a long time, and that we are just now becoming “enlightened” enough to deal with it. It is true, no doubt, that bullying has been around for a very long time, in many forms. My guess is that it has been around approximately as long as mankind. (“Cain, meet your brother, Abel.”) That being the case, we cannot hope to eliminate this phenomenon also known as human sin. Rather, we need to work out better ways to treat those who are its victims with kindness and to punish its perpetrators so as to teach them the importance of being decent human beings, or removing them from decent society—neither of which will be accomplished by the lawyer-drafted half-apologies we’ve seen in this case. At least as important, we need to better structure our institutions to make such inhumane conduct less likely.

Our current educational system is incapable of dealing with this or any other substantial issue of human behavior for the simple reason that it is incapable of treating children as human beings. I know many, many people who have been victims of bullying, as, on occasion, was I in my youth. But, looking back on my own experiences in school, I am convinced that no decision my wife and I have made for the upbringing of our children was more important than this: never, ever to allow them to be warehoused.

My wife and I have utterly abandoned the public schools; we also, by the way, have refused to send our children to any of the mammoth parochial schools that often are their only alternative. The inability of Americans to recognize the ways in which the simple problem of scale encourages pack behavior astounds me. And the role of the school bus—gathering children from miles around to ship them to one, central warehousing facility—has been critical to developing pack mentalities.

The death of the neighborhood school was no accident. Neither was it simply a liberal plot to empower the government. Even today one hears defenses of the warehouse model of schooling on the grounds that it is cheaper, provides more resources for the facilities left standing, and, most important from what I gather, provides for better sports facilities and larger, more talented teams.

It also, of course, tosses children into a mass of strangers, forcing them to compete with so many of their fellows in so many areas of student life that all but a few are left with only failure in a myriad of “fair” competitions. The result, not surprisingly, is anger at a system in which one cannot shine because one is never given the chance to learn to compete well within the small groups in which they can find something at which they are relatively good. The school system’s mass of disappointed, dislocated youth is kept in order, if at all, by adults who are overwhelmed by the sheer mass of humanity they must tend; adults who have been indoctrinated into an ideology in which virtue is an archaism at which one snickers and good character is a self-conflicting morass of radical autonomy, liberal pieties, and tolerance rooted in ignorance and self-interest.

We should not be surprised that such a system relies on a myriad of rules for order and still produces chaos, ignorance, and pockets of resistance rooted in the most primitive urges. Add to this the typical self-involved, absentee parents, whose major demands for education reform are all-day kindergarten and on-site daycare so they can fully dispose of their kids at as early an age as possible, and you have the perfect breeding ground for cruel, selfish punks (and their victims).

If we are going to continue shipping our children to centralized warehouses in the name of sports, or “resources” or anything else, we should not be surprised that we have a war of all against all, with only a leviathan administration to maintain the semblance of peace. And we had best not allow grandmothers to serve as bus monitors. Far better, if “efficient,” “unified” school districts are our model, to hire ex-cons, preferably armed with something more intimidating than a fierce look, to force the socially dislocated beings we have created to behave in a peaceful manner.

Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.

I remember when the term "latchkey kid" emerged on the scene, and most parents were stunned that a few of their peers actually allowed their children to return home from school to an empty house. Those were the days, of course, when most households had only one working parent, and that is my point: Today, the home is as much to blame as the school for the waywardness of our children because mothers, fathers, and good neighbors simply are absent from the home front. Big houses require big incomes, and countless couples have chosen vanity over virtue. The result is a generation of youngsters who all-too-quickly resort to barbarism when challenged by authority figures such as Mrs. Klein. The most disturbing part of the video occurs when the monitor says, "If you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all," to which an off-camera youngster immediately responds, "Why don't you shut the f**k up." More than the fat jokes, more than the poking, that lightning-fast retort is the surest sign that today's children–or enough of them to raise our concern–are growing up without the greatest guide of all: the voice of conscience. No matter what our schools look like–big, small, impersonal, intimate–they are fated with the rest of us to lose the "war on barbarism" in a latchkey world.

As usual, Bruce Frohnen sees below the surface. And I think that Mr. Cote adds something important to the discussion. This incident is not just about bullying–a coverup issue of relatively small importance, a symptom of social and moral breakdown in the cult that has many layers of causes and many layers of implications. School buses–a product almost exactly of my lifetime (ours became a "central" school district in 1939, and universal busing began just after World War II–were safe and orderly until the late 1960s, mostly because they were extensions of the school which was an extension of the family. Most of the barbaric behavior that is reported every day relating to our schools was not a problem as long as the schools were partnerships between teachers and parents. Bullying, for example, was an issue dealt with by older brothers or cousins or dads, not by 50 page documents mandated by state education departments.Bruce is right about "warehousing," of course–and it does not produce better athletics, science labs, language programs, or anything else. I merely accelerates family decay, increases unionization and other dislocations between students, families, and teachers, and encourages the ever-growing gap between generations that further breaks down all aspects of community life. Bruce Frohnen sees so much of this in one small incident, we thank him for that, and gives us an example of what imaginative conservatives should be observing in what otherwise seem like rather ordinary events.

My thanks to Mr. Wilson and Mr. Willson for their comments. Of course, both gentlemen are correct in stating that the problem goes deeper than the educational policies I have criticized. The breakdown of traditional families is a sign as well as a source of the deeper cultural decline from which we suffer in our secular age. My only caveat would be that, particularly in our liberal era, in which we attempt to shape all our institutions to serve our self-chosen ends (principally efficiency and individual autonomy), those institutions themselves continue to shape who we and our children are and will be. Parents, good products of our liberal culture, demand a school system that keeps their kids away from them for as long as possible, so that they can both earn the maximum amount of money and enjoy spending it. The resulting warehouse model of education further degrades those children, and all of us.

Gentlemen, i recall reading that 25 years ago, Soviet grandmothers had no qualms about telling fellow passengers how to raise or control one's offspring. The English (female) dragons were the same. All are dead now. Social mores were enforced by society and woe betide anyone who crossed their paths. A prominent economist(at Heritage no less) recounted how a St Andrews University professor's wife told him how she hated people who ate in the street, he swallowed his Mars bar in one go and it stuck in his gullet like a bow-tie – he has never so sinned in 40 years since.

The Imaginative Conservative offers to our families, our communities, and the Republic, a conservatism of hope, grace, charity, gratitude and prayer. We do this in accord with Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” - W. Winston Elliott III

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The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest. - Russell Kirk